Each year JRS Australia’s policy and advocacy team are invited to provide evidence, expert input and recommendations to government, parliamentary, departmental or statutory body inquiries into aspects immigration, refugees, and asylum policy. Department of Home Affairs (DHA) Consultations on Australia’s…

Jesuit Refugee Service Australia (JRS) welcomes today’s announcement by the Australian government that some refugees on Nauru and Manus Island will be resettled in the United States. The one-off arrangement for recognised refugees on Nauru and Manus Island will prioritise the resettlement of women, children, and family groups, but will also include male refugees on Manus Island. The government has so far provided no timeframes or specific details on the number of people who will be eligible.

“We decide who is coming here.” Malcolm Turnbull must have been hoping to gain both the conservative chops and the electoral success of former Prime Minister John Howard when he uttered these words in defence of his plans to ban asylum seekers who have arrived in Australia on boats from ever entering Australia. It was Howard of course who perfected the art of dog-whistle politics when he said in 2001 that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

Jesuit Refugee Service Australia (JRS) condemns Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s announcement that people arriving by boat to seek asylum in Australia, and currently held in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, would be banned for life from entering Australia.

Every minute of every day in 2015, around 24 people were displaced from their homes. That amounted to 34,000 people per day, worldwide, who were forced to seek refuge elsewhere. These large numbers of newly displaced persons further swelled the 16.1 million refugees in the world who, according to the UN Agency for Refugees (UNHCR), were already displaced.

The war in Syria continues on with no end in sight. For six years, Syrians have lived under a black cloud of misery and death. The numbers of refugees produced by this conflict is staggering: over 4.8 million people have managed to escape the horror and violence of the civil war; these are the lucky ones, the refugees fortunate enough to cross international borders into neighbouring countries in search of safety and protection.

In the wake of the latest reports detailing the abhorrent conditions on Nauru and the recent announcement that the offshore processing centre on Manus Island will finally be closed, a shift has taken place in the public debate on the efficacy of offshore processing.

Austria’s foreign minister recently suggested that people seeking asylum in Europe should not be allowed to enter the continent, but should be held on offshore islands instead. Sebastian Kurz said that the principles of the “Australian model” should be applied to Europe, and went as far as to suggest that people who entered Europe “illegally” should lose their right to apply for asylum.